This application claims benefit of Japanese Patent Application No. 2003-064927 filed on Mar. 11, 2003, the contents of which are incorporated by the reference.
The present invention relates to portable telephone sets and, more particularly, a portable telephone set, which permits the user to produce display images as desired to be displayed on the display screen and store the produced images for selective display at the waiting or like time and an image display method for the same.
With recent progress of communication and semiconductor integration techniques, portable telephone sets (or portable telephone terminals) are in a trend for size and weight reduction, and also with progress of related device techniques in a trend of being more and more improved in performance. Thus, the portable telephone sets are now being rapidly spread. Up to date, the portable telephone sets are used not only as mere voice communication means but also as letter data communication means concerning electronic mails or the like, data retrieval means for executing data retrieval or the like by accessing an internet or like network and image communication means using internal CCD (charged coupled element).
As shown, the portable telephone sets have recently been outstandingly developed and advanced. There is also an increasing demand, with the CCD camera mounted, of image data processing such as imaging with camera. Furthermore, the users are not satisfied with images provided by the manufacturers such as waiting images, menu images and letter input images but demand individual image data peculiar to themselves.
Hitherto, many prior art techniques concerning portable telephone sets have been disclosed. For example, a portable communication terminal has been disclosed, in which a plurality of wall paper images (for instance baseball images, car images and a clock display) are preliminarily stored in a memory part and progressively switched as waiting images whenever the user executes a key operation (see literature 1: Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2002-300241, for instance). Also, there is disclosed in literature 2: Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2002-319998, for instance, a portable telephone set, in which an image drawing area and a tool box are prepared in a display part. In this portable telephone set, the user can produce images as desired on the image drawing area by using the tool box and stored them in a RAM (random access memory) and transmit peculiar image data, and an image reading system using the same portable telephone set.
In the prior art technique disclosed in the Literature 1, however, the user is permitted only to select a plurality of images preliminarily prepared and stored in a memory part by the manufacturer and is not permitted to extract and store images as desired by the user. In the prior art techniques disclosed in the Literature 2, image data are produced with the display part in a matrix-shaped image drawing area, and it takes time and difficult for the user to obtain image data as desired.